


The Near Miss that was almost another Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

by artemisgirl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 15:23:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9663428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artemisgirl/pseuds/artemisgirl
Summary: Pansy's consulting on the restoration of Grimmauld Place; she and Harry are (or get) together and decide to bring their two best friends together: Hermione and Draco.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [SecretAdmirerFicExchange](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/SecretAdmirerFicExchange) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> Not epilogue or Cursed Child compliant.
> 
> Pansy's consulting on the restoration of Grimmauld Place; she and Harry are (or get) together and decide to bring their two best friends together: Hermione and Draco. 
> 
> No character death. Smut optional.

“Come on, Draco! Come on!”

“I'm obviously coming, aren't I?” Draco Malfoy said irritably. “It's not like you're giving me a _choice_.”

Pansy ignored this, continuing to drag Draco Malfoy down the cobblestones of Diagon Alley as fast as she could, forcing Draco into a somewhat odd, bobbing walk behind her.

“Where are we going, anyway?” Draco asked. “I warned you, not out for dinner – it's Valentine's Day, and the wait times will be _mad_...”

“Not if you've made reservations,” Pansy said, shooting him a smug look. There was a devious glint in her eyes.

“ _You?_   Really?” he said, an eyebrow raising. “The girl who tried to hand Potter over to the Dark Lord? _You_ got reservations?”

Pansy sniffed. “You needn't be so skeptical,” she said, dragging him around a corner. “And _no_ , I didn't. I just helped arrange all this.” She gave him a slow, triumphant look. “Your _date_ will have made the reservations for you.”

Draco felt his stomach drop.

“ _No,_ Pansy. I am not going on whatever blind date you have-”

“But _Draco_ , it'll be fun!” Pansy whined. “And we're almost there anyway, and you haven't even looked at the girl-”

“ _No._ I refuse. I will _not_ -”

They rounded another corner onto a side street to see a very nice restaurant, with a long queue of people outside the entryway. The tables outside on the street were even being used, with couples taking the opportunity to enjoy the uncharacteristically warm weather for February. Pansy happily trotted them toward the restaurant, still dragging Draco by the hand. There was a commotion at one of the tables, and Draco's eyes flitted to the table nearest him.

He immediately recognize the Golden Trio: Potter, Weasley, and Hermione Granger. They were all dressed formally for dinner, Hermione in a lovely green and gold dress that Draco's eyes briefly swept over, unable to let it go unappreciated, before looking up to her face.

Hermione seemed to be getting up from the table right now, though, and judging from the murderous look on her face, she seemed to be quite mad. Eyes widening, Draco quickly jerked his hand out of Pansy's.

“ _You...”_

Her voice was venomous, and Draco tried not to panic as he saw her withdraw her wand.

“Hermione, I swear I didn't-” he said, holding his empty hands up in surrender. “I didn't- Pansy brought me-”

Potter and Weasley were standing up now as well, looks of concern on their faces as they watched Hermione. Potter's eyes were darting back and forth from Draco to Hermione to Pansy to Draco, looking wary, while Weasley just looked alarmed and bewildered.

“I swear to you Hermione, I wasn't doing anything,” Draco said carefully, taking a slow step forward. “Let's all sit down, talk about this, and just calm down...”

“ _Avis!”_

Draco yelled and leapt to the side, ducking and rolling out of the way as a furious flock of birds burst from the end of Hermione's wand, screeching and cawing with malice. Pansy screamed as the birds descended on her, furiously pecking her, and Draco only had a second to dodge a bolt of yellow light and duck behind a wooden chair, before a bolt of red light blew the chair up in his face.

“How _dare_ you!” Hermione's voice carried over the sound of the frantic chaos as the other diners screamed and ran for cover inside the restaurant. “You _knew_ I was going out with Harry and Ron today, and you just _figured '_ oh, this is my chance,' and-”

“I didn't figure _anything!_ ” Draco yelled, firing a stunner at her, which Hermione dodged with ease. “Pansy showed up at my door, demanded I get dressed, and that she had a great surprise for me! I didn't _know_ she was bringing me here on a date-”

“You claimed that you haven't been interested in Pansy since you hit puberty!” Hermione shouted back. _“Furnunculus!_ ”

“I'm _not!_ She said it was on a _blind_ date! _Protego!_ ” Hermione's spell bounced off of Draco's shield back towards her. Hermione twirled out of the way, her dress swirling around her, and Draco watched as the spell hit a clueless Weasley, who yelled and clutched his face, pimples erupting across his skin.

“Oh, a _blind_ date? Like _that_ makes it any better-!”

“Hermione! Believe me – I found out that she was planning on taking me on a blind date literally seconds before I turned the corner! I would have never come if she'd told me up front!”

Breathless, Draco skidded to a halt, after ducking and dodging another barrage of curses. Hermione was panting too, her chest heaving, her curls expanding around her head in her anger, and a flitting thought through Draco's mind had him thinking how perhaps she'd never looked quite so lovely as she did right just then.

“Say I give you the momentary benefit of the doubt,” Hermione snarled, wand still aimed directly at Draco. “Say I'm in the mood to humor you. How can you prove your story?”

“Ask Pansy!” Draco responded immediately. “She can tell you!”

“As if I'd trust her,” Hermione scoffed. “And besides...”

She gestured to Pansy, who was moaning and whimpering and rolling around on the ground underneath a table that suicidal sparrows were still sporadically dive-bombing, causing her to shriek in terror each time.

“Then I don't know,” Draco said desperately. “Read my mind. We can get a pensieve. _Anything_. But I swear to you, Hermione, _she didn't tell me_ she was setting me up on a blind date until she'd already Apparated us to Diagon Alley.”

“Oh, please!” Hermione snorted. “What kind of friend doesn't truthfully tell you what you're doing when you go out?”

“Um... Hermione...? About that...”

There was a pregnant pause.

“What?!” Hermione whirled around on Potter. Potter was currently helping Weasley heal his enormous bursting pimples one by one, looking vaguely guilty.

“I brought you here for a blind date, too,” he said, wincing. “We knew that you'd never agree to go on a blind date normally, but we both agreed that you _desperately_ needed to get out and start trying to find someone, so I told you that the Trio should just have an 'us' night, celebrate our love as friends, y'know, and then once you got here, we'd just swap me and Ron out from the table for your...”

It was funny, almost, watching how quickly Hermione's rage could do a complete 180 and focus on an entirely different person, Draco mused, discreetly dusting off his cloak as Hermione rounded on Harry.

“You and _Ron_ were going to set me up on some random blind date too?” Hermione's voice was low, and furious. “You would _betray_ me like that...?”

“Not me and Ron, me and Pansy!” Harry said, dodging a nonverbal curse Hermione sent at him with a yelp. “And not a _random_ blind date – we were setting you up with Malfoy!”

Hermione paused, wand still raised.

“...Draco is supposed to be my blind date?” she said.

Harry nodded nervously.

“And you suspect Pansy had to also trick Draco to get him out the door for this blind date?”

Harry nodded again.

Wordlessly, Hermione waved her wand, immediately healing Ron of his bursting pustules, causing a yelp of gratitude from her ginger friend. She turned and waved her wand again at the table Pansy was still cowering under, causing all of her birds to disappear, with the carcasses of the ones that had dive-bombed their brains through their beaks vanishing as well.

Potter hurried over to help Pansy out from underneath the table. Pansy was whimpering, her stockings snagged and ruined, her makeup running and her hair mussed. Draco calmly strolled across the way to stand at his girlfriend's side, who was readjusting her hair with a deliberate unconcerned air.

“I apologize for the unexpected commotion,” Hermione told the maître d', who was carefully peering out from around the door. “I thought I was under attack. Please charge any damages to Mr. Potter's bill, and we'll have everything fixed in just a moment.”

The woman nodded wordlessly and vanished back inside.

“Under attack?” Draco murmured, and Hermione tossed her hair.

“I thought my relationship was under attack,” she informed him. “By _you_ , but nonetheless under attack. What would _you_ have thought if you saw me striding down the street, dressed like this hand, in hand with another man on Valentine's Day?”

Draco felt a flash of hot fury at this non-existent man, before gradually managing to force his hand from his wand.

“...I suppose I would have been none-to-pleased about it either,” he said delicately.

Hermione raised an eyebrow at him, but then with a quirk of her lips, she nodded.

“Exactly.”

Draco smiled back at Hermione, glad to see she'd calmed down, and Hermione smiled simply back up at him for a long moment, before turning to the wreckage around her.

“...help me clean this up?” she requested, looking up at Draco. “Once everything's in order, we can have Potter order everyone new dinners and free dessert, and then you and Pansy can join our table, and we'll figure out exactly just _what_ is going on.”

“Gladly,” Draco smirked. He withdrew his wand and set about repairing the damage Hermione's birds had done to the glass-topped table Pansy had hid underneath.

“We didn't know you and Malfoy were already dating, apparently!” Potter snapped, helping daub a poultice on some of Pansy's worse-looking gouges.

“We didn't tell you because we thought both sets of our friends would object,” Hermione said primly, conjuring up another wooden chair to replace the one she'd blown apart. “Seeing as you and Pansy obviously _don't_ object to the idea of Draco and I dating one another, we can safely reveal that now without worrying about a silly argument or disagreement over the fact.”

“Instead, we can focus on the other argument that _will_ need to immediately happen,” Draco pronounced. “Namely: the fact that you and Pansy are apparently dating each other.”

Hermione nodded gravely. “I completely agree. I know that you've grown more friendly since she's been helping you redo Grimmauld Place, but _really,_ Harry. She's a vicious Slytherin who tried to turn you over to Voldemort.”

“And Pansy: I'm disappointed in you,” Draco told her sternly, cleaning up the debris riddled across the alley. “I thought you knew better than dating a foolish, headstrong Gryffindor with messy hair who'd rather curse first and ask questions later.”

Hermione shot Draco a fond look, and Draco had to suppress his laughter as Weasley looked on in wonder, obviously rather confused about everything.

“Happy Valentine's Day, love,” Draco murmured, dropping a kiss to her hair. “Even if it is terribly over-commercialized and trite.”

“Love you too,” Hermione said back, her eyes sparkling up at him. She looked up at him happily, before her eyes snapped back around. “Ronald, if you'd just let the maître d' know that it's safe for everyone to come out again, and that we'd all like new orders of our food – yes, thank you. Harry, Pansy: if you two could sit down, right there please – yes, there, thank you – then we could begin the discussion on what is and is _not_ acceptable behavior of things to do your friends.”

The sheepish, shame-faced look shared on Potter's and Pansy's nervous faces was perhaps one of the best Valentine's Day gifts Draco could ever get.

 

 


End file.
